


y'all mamas would've loved y'all/if they could've breathed

by resident_longwinded_anon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 12, in which I have a lot of feelings about Mary Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 00:35:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29534853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resident_longwinded_anon/pseuds/resident_longwinded_anon
Summary: But. She looks at their faces, these hard-limbed, strange-eyed men, and all she can see are the people who killed her sons.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Mary Winchester, Mary Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	y'all mamas would've loved y'all/if they could've breathed

**Author's Note:**

> It's my birthday. Happy birthday, me! As a present, here's a teeny tiny introspective Mary piece. I have... A Lot Of Feelings about season 12 Mary, guys. A LOT OF FEELINGS. So many feelings that apparently I wrote my third fic in a month, wow. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Title from clipping.'s "The Deep". ([x](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT1ujfuXFVo))

She tries so hard not to hate them.

They didn’t ask for this life. They certainly didn’t ask for all these even greater shadows, these apocalypses - apocalypses, plural! - they keep alluding to. They didn’t even really ask to have her back.

But. She looks at their faces, these hard-limbed, strange-eyed men, and all she can see are the people who killed her sons.

Oh, she knows, she _knows_ they’re still alive in there: little Dee, whose favorite color was royal blue, who had _Oh The Thinks You Can Think!_ memorized so he could read it to her pregnant belly, who slept with the tattered little hand-me-down turtle they got from their neighbors the Christmas before he was born; and her Sammy, her baby boy, with his big dark eyes and soft whorl of hair, who was so close to figuring out how to sit up. She knows that somehow, in the decades she’s been dead, they grew and changed into these unrecognizable giants, but they’re the same people, really, they are. She knows that, no matter how many times she startles awake with nightmares painted on her eyelids, convinced she can hear her children screaming just down the hall, the men she calls Sam and Dean didn’t really sneak into that little house in Lawrence and smother them in their sleep.

Her boys aren’t dead. They’re just buried. And - if anyone buried them - it was... John.

Her memories of Heaven are foggy and unclear. She knows she was happy, in an intellectual sense, though she can’t recall much of the feeling itself. It’s images, mostly, sun-warm and impressionist: sitting on a deck watching the clouds roll in, fishing off the edge of a little rowboat, kissing against a tree in a crowded forest. And John: everywhere, John.

The men who are her boys tell her he was a legacy, that this life had circled him like a shark for years before she collided with him. They tell her, in strange, halting voices (she’s _younger_ than them), that she didn’t sign his death certificate when she did their marriage contract: it would have gotten him eventually, this life. (It would have gotten them eventually, too, her boys, their angel tells her. They couldn’t have escaped their destiny. She punches a wall instead of his strange breakable face.)

She loved him, or she thought she did, or she will again, and she trusted -

Here’s the thing. She knew, when they decided to have kids, how fragile the world was. She knew just how likely it was that she or John or both of them would wither or fade or, or - burn up. She knew she had to trust in two things, to have his children: that he would stand with her. That he _could_ stand _without_ her.

And then he raised them hunters.

He looked at the broken world and he looked at his broken children and thought he could use one to fix the other, and it aches in her because she recognizes that impulse, by God does she see it in herself, but Christ, fuck, his children weren’t tools. Her children weren’t tools.

So she tries not to hate them. It’s not their fault. They shake and cry from trauma she doesn’t understand, and they flinch from shadows she cannot see, and they share sly smiles over inside jokes more impenetrable than any foreign language, and she tries not to hate them.

She sees herself in them, and she hates that too. Dean is a killer, sharp and narrow and dangerous, a blade hidden in a boot, her shattered mirror. Sam is - Sam is something she was never brave enough to be. Sam looked at this life, this bare, mean little life, and grew a garden from all its dust. (This is who I am, he says to her. I can’t imagine being anything else. She cries herself to sleep.)

They’ve both been to Hell and back, their angel tells her. They’ve both been to Purgatory and back. They’ve both been to Heaven and back. She asks, is there anywhere they haven’t been? And Castiel’s eyes go dark and sad. He doesn’t answer.

She tries not to hate them.


End file.
